Heart to Heart
by X6Herbius
Summary: Gordon's helping to revive Alyx after her near-fatal injury. However, someone else intervines, someone Gordon hasn't seen for a while...


**My second story I felt inspired to write after re-watching a YouTube video about the Episode 2 G-man meeting. This is my first story from Gordon's point of view and I really enjoyed writing it: G-man scenes are perfect for lavish description, which seems to be one of my high points... ;)**

**Enjoy.**

_

* * *

_

"Doctor Freeman..."

The voice, a mocking sing-song like a bully in a playground, rang out omnipresent. Suddenly, the Vortigaunts, adorned with their purple electric auras, froze completely. Alyx looked eerie, her right leg displaying the muscles inside like it was made of glass, lying so delicately on the metal table. Yet nothing stirred. Gordon felt time itself trickle out of the scene, like sand from an ancient hourglass, leaving a void in its place. The silence was unbreakable.

Suddenly, Gordon's sight was engulfed by a brilliant white light. The rays bloomed around his irises, blinding him with their intensity before slowly fading to bring forth another vision. Directly in front of him, not a hair out of place, appeared the face of the man he had not seen for a couple of days. _His employer, _Gordon was forcibly reminded with a shudder. The figure seemed to blend seamlessly with the Vortigaunts' scene in the background; where one ended and the other began, Gordon couldn't tell. Why had he chosen such an awkward time to appear? Gordon hadn't caught a glimpse of the gaunt, sneering face for days on end... Why now, when Alyx desperately needed him more than ever before?

The man seemed to read his mind in the blink of an eye. "I realize this moment may not be the most..._convenient_...for a _heart-to-heart_..." he drawled, a slight smirk appearing on the thin, pink lips that hardly moved when he talked.

All of a sudden, Gordon realised he was no longer breathing. The air around him had become solid...or a vacuum. His lungs refused to respond; his legs no longer felt the reassuring surface of the ground below him. But then...his body didn't seem to need the oxygen. There he was, neither solid nor transparent, neither alive nor dead, in a "chamber" of nothingness where time itself did not exist. Cause and effect no longer applied.

And absolutely nothing stirred. The world no longer cared for the fourth dimension.

"But, I had to _wait_..." The man continued with a hiss. It didn't sound as though waiting was something he was accustomed to doing. "...until your -" he paused for a wisp of a second, irony practically dripping from every oddly pronounced syllable he spoke. _"- friends?"_

A bare speck of a chuckle made its way across the man's pursed mouth, from one side to the other like an anaconda. "...were otherwise _occupied_..."

Another blinding flash saturated Gordon's eyes. He would have flinched, except that without the time to do it in it was impossible. _Why_ did the man want to speak to him in the first place? Gordon wouldn't have exactly called it _long-time-no-see._ A part of him began to dread the prospect of what his employer might want him for, but he couldn't resist in any way if he was held in place by the dark bounds of a frozen moment.

The whiteness faded. The man's figure was clearer now: Gordon could see the top of his shoulders, shrouded as always in his blue business-like suit with the slender, purple tie. He was beginning to associate the formality with the man's matter-of-fact tone, the way his breath seemed to whisper as quiet as a mouse but with a thousand times the malice any human could muster. The Vortigaunts and Alyx were still present in the background, stuck in a halted timeline, floating in the abyss away from the flow of continuum that was directed purely over Gordon and his apparitional employer.

The man narrowed his eyes and smiled slightly again, a contented sigh sounding all the more menacing to Gordon as he observed. The man had a habit of getting his way, whether or not it was in the interests of anyone else, and his words suggested that his influence over Gordon may have gone back further than he had first thought. When the Citadel was unstable, Gordon hadn't caught sight of the blue suit or the crew-cut hair throughout the entire trek out of City 17. He'd assumed that he'd fallen off the man's radar because of the Vortigaunt's surprise interference; for a time he'd been right, but now... Gordon was beginning to doubt how much his employer actually had lost his track. The hunter in the deserted scrapyard, the one that had wounded Alyx...could that have simply been a ploy to keep the Vortigaunts busy? It was amazing to even contemplate taking someone to the brink of death, just to have what the man had called a "heart-to-heart" with his employee, but Gordon wouldn't have been completely surprised if this was the case. The personality and demeanour of his crafty, self-appointed superior wouldn't let insignificant things like _morals _stand in the path of whatever he had planned.

The man in question was staring straight into Gordon's eyes. Each word he whispered sent a chill down his subject's spine unlike anything Gordon had ever experienced. "There was a time they cared nothing for Miss..._Vance_... When their only experience of humanity was a..._crowbar..._coming at them down a steel corridor..."

The Vortigauts, along with the frail Alyx, had faded completely from view: all that was left was the man, lit by some sombre, unearthly light that emanated from nowhere. Gordon gave a small start as part of his brain stirred: he recognised a feeling he had not dared to conjure up in front of his employer. At the mention of Alyx's name Gordon had felt a small fire ignite inside him, one that had triggered one of his rather more common emotions: anger. Alyx needed him. He should have been part of the group trying to revive her. She was on the fringe, "clinging to the margins" as the Vortigaunts put it, in desperate need of help; and this man had come to just _pluck_ him from the entire scene? Gordon had more important priorities to attend to, rather than listen to the patronising voice of a being that might not even be human. If he lost Alyx... Gordon couldn't bring himself to contemplate the possibility. She was part of the resistance, holding the key to the Combine portal; if she died, fate would take hold of humanity and pull everything down with it.

But there was more than that. Alyx had become someone special to Gordon. They'd been through the Citadel _twice,_ escaped from the massive explosion that had destroyed City 7, fought all manner of alien beasts...but through it all together. Gordon had noticed the glint in Alyx's eyes when she looked at him. There was something there, something that he recognised inside himself, and he wouldn't let it go.

_And he still hadn't told her... She needed to know the way he felt..._

Before Gordon could press his longings any further, the world turned white again. When the light faded he gave a start: he suddenly recognised the place he was looking in on. It seemed such a long time ago since Gordon had stood, in exactly the same place, chatting to Barney over his computer desk in Black Mesa, but there it was: exactly the same as he remembered it, except completely and utterly empty. The office-like room was lit from the right hand side by a pair of doors, their frosted glass windows throwing peculiar patterns of cold, fluorescent light onto the far wall, and at the end of the room a massive screen was hanging, its front face a deathly black. Gordon spotted the man sitting at the wide desk, in front of the screen, but his almost ghost-like image was projected forwards onto Gordon's vision, floating disembodied and superimposed over the view of the stone room.

"When I..._plucked her_...from Black Mesa..." The man began speaking again, his tone soft, informative and rhythmic as if he were explaining something to a small child, but his features just as cold and chilling as ever. The large screen behind fluttered into life, static appearing for a second before being replaced by a turquoise background and the Black Mesa logo: a flat-topped mountain encircled by a bold, black, printed ellipse. There was something about the beginning flicker, however, that chilled Gordon's blood as he watched in silence. It was barely a quarter of a second's worth of static but there was something there, something hidden... Something that shouldn't be there. Gordon didn't know how he knew but all of a sudden his subconscious mind stirred with a prospect; a prospect even he didn't think could be possible.

Was there a figure behind the static?

_No. It couldn't be him..._

Gordon's employer once again cut short his train of thought, as if a telepathic gate closed up his mind as soon as the man continued talking. He gave a small chuckle, like he was laughing at some sort of private joke. "...I acted in the face of _objections_ that she was a _'mere child' _and of _'no practical use to anyone'_..."

The man lifted his hand with its long, slender fingers to his chest as if miming an emotion. Gordon felt that it would be far-fetched, to say the least, to think that this man might actually _care_ about what happened to "Miss Vance." His gesture was a mocking one, one that Gordon himself saw right through. _Emotions_ tended to look out of place on a figure as cold and passionless as the man in the blue suit, and the _hand-on-heart _seemed as fake as a wooden actor's.

On the word "objections", the screen behind the man's apparition-like projection had changed with another fuzz of static. A picture, as if from a CCTV camera, appeared showing the ring of electric purple Vortigaunts surrounding Alyx's body. Gordon's heart faltered as he saw the depiction: the entire top of Alyx's beautiful frame had been made transparent by the Vortigaunt's mysterious healing technique, exposing a view of her muscles, ribcage, organs and brain. She looked so fragile there but still just as pretty, even if half her skin seemed to have turned to glass...

Gordon's employer once again continued his monologue as Gordon himself found his view slowly drifting forward, until all he could see was the bizarre picture of Alyx up on the monitor, engulfing his vision. "I have learned to ignore such _nay-sayers_ when -"

The man faltered for the first time, apparently selecting the most appropriate word for what he had wanted to do.

"- _quelling...them?_ - was out of the question..."

Not for the first time, Gordon felt confused by what his superior had said. Since when had _he_ resisted the instinct to _quell_ someone? It sounded as though there were authorities higher than the man himself, a concept Gordon had not even considered up until now. He remembered the man's short speech as he had been rescued from the erupting Citadel several days before: his "contract" had been reportedly _open to the highest bidder. _Did that mean there were other influences as well, besides the man sitting in front of him? Gordon shuddered to think what the higher powers might have in store for him.

Again, the screen in front of him had changed. The picture of Alyx had disappeared, replaced by an empty stone corridor Gordon recognised from the transmission he and Alyx had picked up from the Citadel days earlier. The transmission from Doctor Mossman, except she wasn't in the freeze-frame; the only indication of Earth was the many shafts of sunlight which were pouring in through the windows on the right like beams from heaven.

And, all of a sudden, the bright white filled Gordon's eyes again. When the bloom left his vision, he found himself actually standing in the corridor in question, his employer situated to the left and his face superimposed over Gordon's sight, once again, on the right hand side. The slice of time the man had chosen to materialise in seemed rather gruesome to Gordon: a Combine soldier, advancing lengthways down the pipe-lined walkway, appeared to have been caught in the head by enemy crossfire and blood was pouring out of the back of his helmet in a fountain of deep red. In the background a couple of rebels, their faces set in steel grimaces, stood in a combat stance with sub-machine guns blazing. The gravity of the situation caught in Gordon's mind and for a moment he felt in slight awe, able to witness a frozen battle without being in any danger whatsoever.

_Well, he said that..._

Gordon's employer gave a malicious snigger. "Still... I am not one to _squander_ my _investments_..."

Gordon felt sure that statement was true. In the man's case, "investments" usually meant people. People he could use.

"And I remain confident that she was worth far more than the _initial...appraisal_..."

Gordon noticed once again the oddly clinical language the man used, as if humans were simply expendable assets for use in his schemes. From a "mere child" to a _"mere object"_...

Once again the white light burned into Gordon's retinas but the man kept talking.

"That's why I must now..._extract_...from _you_...some small..._repayment_...owed for your own _survival_..."

Gordon didn't like the way this was heading. The scene had changed yet again: he was now standing in some sort of silo, housing a white missile or rocket whose jets of steam were frozen in the air in front of him. There was a man reaching up into the electronics of the nose-cone, someone else Gordon recognised, although it was a relatively new face.

Doctor Magnusson.

The employer himself was leaning against one of the railings surrounding the missile, looking what Gordon thought was a little too casual for his formal way of dressing. The man turned around to face Gordon and the incredibly penetrating stare he was given made the marrow in his bones run cold. Colder that the frigid air around him.

"See her safely to White Forest, Doctor Freeman."

The man's tone was stony and deadly serious. There was no hint of sarcasm there now, just an evil-sounding purr from the mouth of dictator. And the eyes... The man's eyes were luminescent, looming out of the darkness like two sickly green discs. Gordon found them almost hypnotising but strangely chilling, oddly mesmerising...

"I _wish_ I could do more than keep an eye on _you_...but I have agreed to abide by certain..._restrictions...?_"

Gordon felt unsure as to who had set down these restrictions. The Vortigaunts? Some universal power higher then the man himself? Maybe that was why Gordon had seen so little of his employer through his recent escapades in City 17... Well, he certainly wasn't too worried about the lack of influence the man was allowed over him now.

Again, the white flash enveloped him. When his sight had returned, however, Gordon was rather shocked to find the man standing over the body of Alyx. She looked perfectly still, as if she were dead. But she couldn't be...the man had regarded her as his "investment"...surely he couldn't have let anything happen to her...

"Well...now. Listen carefully, _my dear._"

The sarcasm was all too obvious in that statement.

"When you see your..._father_..."

At the advent of the word, Gordon discovered a strange sensation. A sound, like a seismic wave, ran through his brain and made his very blood turn cold. The man knew about Eli? How far was he involved?

"...relay these words: _prepare for unforeseen consequences..._"

As the man finished his instruction, Alyx's eyes and mouth leapt open, as if she were gasping for air. Gordon gave a start; he tried to reach out to her but moving was impossible. For what would be the final time, the whole world turned white once more. Gordon was saturated with the light, but somehow he knew he was returning to the present...

Wherever that was.

_Unforeseen consequences..._

* * *

**NB: If you watch a video of this scene and pause it when the Black Mesa screen goes into static, take a look at who you can see lying with their head on the left, like they're in stasis... You might be surprised. :)**


End file.
